Mark Landsbaum: Global warming alarmists try again

Dec. 4, 2011

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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In this image made available by Greenpeace, activists dressed as trees protest the deforestation of the Amazon jungle in Brazil in Durban, South Africa, Nov. 29, the second day of the two-week U.N. climate conference attended by 192 parties seeking agreement on future action to curb climate change. ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO

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A child, right, looks back as a person dressed as a sun walk, as part of the exhibit by Greenpeace for the climate change conference happening in Durban, South Africa, Nov 29. ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO

In this image made available by Greenpeace, activists dressed as trees protest the deforestation of the Amazon jungle in Brazil in Durban, South Africa, Nov. 29, the second day of the two-week U.N. climate conference attended by 192 parties seeking agreement on future action to curb climate change. ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO

It's a good thing the world's economy is going into the toilet. Otherwise, global warming extremists would have done some real damage.

It's ironic that as evidence mounted exposing the shaky science and duplicitous scheming behind global warming alarmism, it wasn't these truths that undermined the movement to tax and regulate your carbon footprint.

Science, as alarmists inadvertently confirmed from the onset, essentially is irrelevant in deciding whether the Earth is heating dangerously, and whether that requires regulations and taxes at monumental cost – and huge profits to warmist profiteers. Think Al Gore.

It wasn't the trumped-up science that drove this movement. It's always been about control and money. Their control of your money.

It's interesting that rather than the emerging true science slowing the rush to global conformism, instead it has been a deteriorating economic climate that put the skids to the climate change movement. Thank goodness for bad economic times.

Regardless of who is right about the next 100 years of temperatures, it has been declining sales, job losses, foreclosures and bankruptcies that ultimately slowed the global warming movement's momentum. Average Joes and pretentious potentates alike increasingly determined their own economic self-interests make it unwise to redistribute their wealth to stave off another almost undetectable 0.8 degree of temperature increase like the one we've experienced over the past 150 years. By the way, can you feel the difference of 0.8 degree Celsius?

Thousands of attendees, the "usual suspects," as contrarian environmental scientist S. Fred Singer puts it, have gathered again under the auspices of the United Nations for "two weeks of feasting, partying, living it up in luxury hotels" at someone else's expense in Durban, South Africa, (oh, the carbon footprint) to get worldwide consensus to impose Draconian regulations and punitive taxes. Fat chance.

Maybe the best news out of Durban last week was this pronouncement by Seyni Nafo of Mali, who whined: "Developed countries as a whole are not taking climate change seriously as a global issue. Look at the U.S."

It's times like this that make you proud to be an American.

The underlying plot behind this global scheme is for developed nations, like ours, to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions while forking over billions of dollars to developing nations, like Mali, to build windmills and line bureaucrats' pockets.

The oft-repeated threats of climate-change disaster, always said to occur a century in the future, ring hollow to people who want to keep jobs and prosperity generated by greenhouse-gas emitting industries. That is a welcome relief after decades of climate scare-mongering that sadly have diverted too much capital to boondoggles like the half-billion dollars lost in Solyndra's tax-subsidized solar-panel pipe dreams.

Not only has the U.S. refused to sign on to the greenhouse gas emission-limiting 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the last agreement with any teeth, but China and India won't, either, as long as other major countries refuse, as now Japan and Russia do, too.

Kyoto expires next year. You can bet a ton of CO2 emissions it will whither away, not be replaced, and certainly not be enhanced. Canada last week reportedly became the latest defector from "the cause." (More later on "the cause.")

"If the Kyoto Protocol is devoid of any further commitment period, the Kyoto Protocol itself will be dead," China's lead negotiator lamented in Durban.

That sound you don't hear is a worldwide shrug of indifference. When stacked up against dollars in the pocket and food on the table, global warming scare stories rate a big "So what?"

As Europe frantically props up financially failing Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, France and Ireland, the Continentals are in no hurry to pony up their share of the $100 billion a year the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change insists be redistributed to Third World nations to offset the consequences of "climate change," whatever that euphemism means now.

Email embarrassment

As global warming faded amid worldwide financial cooling, it didn't help "the cause" that thousands of emails authored by the leading IPCC grant- and tax-funded researchers provided a damaging look behind the scenes. The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Marlo Lewis describes this alarmist cabal as, "schemers colluding to manipulate public opinion, downplay inconvenient data, bias the peer review process, marginalize skeptical critics and flout freedom of information laws." We think Marlo's a bit soft in his criticism.

The latest leaked emails show internal bickering apparently revealing some of their own reaching their tolerance limits, such as this email to Keith Briffa of the British Climate Research Unit: "Keith, See the last item. Why don't you just give these people the raw data? Are you hiding something – your apparent refusal to be forthcoming sure makes it look as though you are. Tom."

These candid confessions, obviously never meant to be made public, include admissions like one from Briffa's CRU colleague, climatologist Phil Jones: "Basic problem is that all the models are wrong – not got enough middle and low-level clouds."

It's the warmists' touted computer models that assured us for nearly two decades how intolerable global warming will make our future. They have no other way of knowing.

The warmists' snow job is based on gathering ground temperature records, but not to use all of them, and then to "adjust" many of those they do use. For example, numerous stations located in cold Siberia disappeared in the 1990s. And isn't it fascinating that original data is unavailable for critics to review?

As even some of their supporters are beginning to acknowledge, the vast majority of U.S. ground temperature stations are improperly located, often adjacent to heat-generating sources. Richard Muller, the UC Berkeley professor who got a lot of press when he released a study essentially confirming temperature readings used by alarmists, also conceded that 70 percent of U.S. stations are badly sited. Garbage in, garbage out.

Incidentally, the U.S. stations are far superior to those in the rest of the world.

Not so incidentally, Muller's report, lauded by the media, took no position on whether the less-than-trustworthy warming he found is caused by humans.

But the IPCC faithful have no qualms about blaming warming, however much may or may not be happening, on mankind. Just don't ask too many questions.

"Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of research grants we get – and has to be well hidden," CRU's Jones wrote in another email. "I've discussed this with the main funder in the past, and they are happy about not releasing the original station data."

Lest we jump to conclusions, consider another Jones email: "I've been told that the IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process."

Some alarmists claim the emails are out of context. We join other critics who await alarmists providing any context that would render such comments innocuous.

Already, preliminary greenhouse gas-inspired regulations and taxes make energy more costly. More-costly energy makes food more costly, and transportation, housing, and, well just about everything.

If the economy improves, decision-makers and the public will should use real science to decide whether mankind is superheating the Earth. And if so, what, if anything can or should be done about it. We hope someone will suggest weighing costs against presumed benefits.

Perhaps then, less weight will be given to manipulators, secretive schemers and grant-hungry IPCC scientists, such as those who whipped up global warming fever for 20 years.

Perhaps more attention will be paid then to what an internal U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report acknowledges: "given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based upon a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."

That, mind you, is a U.S. government agency heretofore eager to clamp down on your carbon emissions. The author doesn't advance "the cause," which is how climate alarmist scientist Michael Mann referred in one email to the global warming campaign.

A Mann email complained about a defector from the movement: "I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don't know what she thinks she's doing, but its not helping the cause."

And you thought it was about science?

The real threat

We aren't threatened by global warming. The threat is from global warmists.

What they have is a theory that things are getting warmer, which may or may not be true. Then they take a leap in logic that says things will continue to get much warmer, even though the purported cause of this warmth, greenhouse gas emissions, have escalated for 15 years while temperatures have remained flat or even declined.

Then they take another leap that presumes warming is harmful, even though it makes growing crops easier, and life less expensive in cold places, and more CO2 in the atmosphere is a boon to agriculture. Then they presume man can reverse all of this by using windmills and solar panels, which no one will buy unless someone else subsidizes them, and even then must be backed up with conventional, C02-emitting energy plants for when the sun doesn't shine and wind doesn't blow.

This is a chain of so many "ifs" it's amazing so many people have bought in to it. Until, of course, they are asked to sacrifice their own prosperity and comfort. Then, as they are discovering in Durban, that's enough of this nonsense.

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